I walked into the house from the front porch. The rickety old screen door slams behind me.
Out of the mist of time I'm at the kitchen table with my whole family. It's in the early part of May 1954. Mama has the newest little Smith in her lap as she spoons beans into blue speckled aluminum plates for the toddlers. They sit on the old wooden bench with three more of us. Nine Smith children along with Mama and Daddy makes for crowding. Six sit in ladderbacks all scrounched together.
I hear spoons and forks clatter, coffee cups dinging against saucers, everybody talking at once and somehow I understand exactly everything being said. I learned early on to multi listen.
I believe this talking and understanding all at once is from my Grissett DNA.
Poor Mama looks worn. Poor Daddy looks burdened and creased.
This is the last few days of our entire family gathered around the table. Baby sister Cathy is brand new, oldest brother Rayford is just days away from going out into the world to seek whatever there is to seek.
In all the rushing toward the future for us, I'm caught in a web of not knowing.
Will my brother be okay gone from us?
Will Mama be okay with her first child leaving the nest?
Will my baby sister ever miss one she won't get to really know like I do.
Will I get to move off the bench and sit in a ladderback to eat here at the table with our family shrinking one at the time?
Will Daddy feel less burdened?
Will Mama have time to write letters to addresses not yet known?
I can see it all in a swirl of light and colors and in black and white.
I smell the coffee, I hear a truck rumbling passed the lane out front. I feel a breeze come through the screen.
The cat sits there on the window ledge looking in.
I hear the squak of chickens going to roost.
I hear the hogs squealing to root into a better position at the trough.
Old Jim barks.
Humpy looks out the window.
We all laugh and talk and argue and spoon and fork in Mama's delicious cooking.
Plain and simple and good and plenty.
Daddy lifts his saucer to blow on the coffee before he slurps from the rim.
Mama lifts the baby to her shoulder as she bites into a piece of cornbread.
I can feel one of the toddlers rubbing her foot against my leg.
I kick the spindly leg away.
I see my little brother Buddy wipe his mouth on his arm.
I hear the cows lowing way back there in the thickets near the pond.
I understand the urgency for Mama to do the milking before hard dark.
Me and Deanie wash the dishes while everybody drifts away from the table.
Some start moving away to the front porch for the evenings ritual of awaiting bedtime as Daddy indulges in his deadly affair with Prince Albert.
I can hear my brothers bounce the basketball against the netless rim that is attached above the door of the old smokehouse.
My little sisters, Annie and Coot push and argue as they jump off the high end of the porch.
Little sister Todd looks but is just too small to jump.
I see Mama come trudging back from the cow lot with a full pail of milk looking tired and worn.
I think of Mama as an old woman.
Mama was a beautiful forty five year old mother of nine children.
I run down the yard towards the barn to lift my arms and soar above all of my family below.
I dip and turn and wave.
They don't know I'm there above it all.
For a moment I see them all as clear as if I'm really there.
***I slept very deeply that night of dreaming.
